Wolfgang Kaiser (KgU)

Wolfgang Kaiser (16 February 1924 – 6 September 1952) was a member of Rainer Hildebrandt's "Struggle against Inhumanty" group (KgU / Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit) which campaigned against the one party dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic.

Later his work as the KgU's chemistry expert transferred to three basement rooms in an apartment which the movement rented at Kurfürstendamm No.106, in the city's central Halensee district.

In his rooms Kaiser kept a large number of these ampoules which he seems to have used in experiments involving small quantities of all sorts of chemicals that he got hold of, including the nerve agent Cantharidin.

Joachim Müller had undertaken an unsuccessful arson attack against a temporary wooden Autobahn bridge at Finowfurt,[5][6] he had successfully employed a stink-capsule to make a polling station unusable.

Ursula Müller stated that a KgU member, "most likely" Ernst Tillich, at that time the campaigning group's leader,[1] would have wished to drive a car to Finowfurt with a petrol/gasoline canister, incendiary equipment and "tyre destroyers" in support of a plan to burn down the nearby "Kaiser Bridge".

Hoppe had facilitated "administrative damage" to the East German economy by helping the KgU with the distribution of financially sensitive "news items", original forms and printed circulars.

[9] During their "preparation" they had been "incriminated over things that had not been known to the defense, and which could not be found in the papers filed with the court" ("„mit Dingen belastet, die weder der Verteidigung bekannt waren, noch dem Akteninhalt entnommen werden konnten").

He produced an expert witness who testified that the potassium chlorate and ammonium nitrate in the possession of Kaiser and the "explosives case" passed to Burianek were not suitable to blow up the railways bridge, but might at the most dissolve the rails.

Although the Resistance Department of the KgU had issued doses of the poison to some of their contacts in East Germany, there was no evidence that any had been used,[12] which meant that this line of attack could be presented to the court only in terms of what might theoretically be possible.

According to the defence lawyer Büsing, on the second day of the trial, during a break in the proceedings that came just before the pleadings of Prosecutor Melsheimer, the presiding judge, Hilde Benjamin explained that Kaiser would have to be sentenced to death "on the instruction of [...her] friends" ("auf Anweisung [...ihrer] Freunde").

[13] That day, 9 August 1952, the Supreme Court handed down the death sentence to Wolfgang Kaiser, the "incorrigible enemy of the hard working people" ("unverbesserlichen Feind des werktätigen Volkes").

[15] There is no sign of any formal appeals process being invoked, but on 15 August 1952 Wolfgang Kaiser's father, who lived in West Berlin, wrote a letter to Wilhelm Pieck, the East German president, begging for clemency.

[17] The application made at the time by Dr. Walter Friedeberger, the director of the German Hygiene (medical) Museum in Dresden, for permission to "recover the human organs" of Kaiser and Burianek was rejected.

Very shortly before the Kaiser trial the Supreme Court of East Germany had for the first time invoked Article 6 of the Constitution, in a related case, to impose its first death sentence on Johann Burianek, another KgU member.

From the East German perspective, the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU / "Struggle Against Inhumanity" group) looked like a terrorist organisation led by the American spy agencies and the defendants, its members, had planned acts of sabotage, murder and terrorism.

[19] Even though no evidence for the demolition of anything by the KgU existed,[20][21] and no name for any East German official supposedly targeted for murder was ever produced, the trial and its aftermath made an impression with public opinion in the west.

[3] Some of the revelations about the KgU presented in West Germany's news magazine Der Spiegel during the 1950s involved matters that were already in the public sphere thanks to East German propaganda.

The Party journalist-politician Albert Norden described West Berlin as a "vipers' nest", that provided the gangsters, who "want to make the lives of the Germans hellish" ("die das Leben der Deutschen zur Hölle machen sollen").

The ruling SED (party) developed a scapegoat theory which traced the country's economic difficulties, its failings, and even the uprising of 17 June 1953 back to the show trials of 1952.